With hot weather on its way, almost everyone here has found cool spots to nap away the afternoons. Pia has the best spot and a perfect one for a long-haired floof – under the bed between a wooden box and a cardboard box where a slight breeze wafts through from a nearby ceiling fan. It’s so nice there, Mom is seriously giving thought to sharing this narrow space during the upcoming summer months. Surely, Pia will share. Right?
When not burrowed into a bedcovers fort, Quint prefers an unheated cubby hole in one of the towers. This one is cool, quiet, and blocks just enough of the breeze coming from the fan. And he doesn’t have to worry about sharing the space. There ain’t no way Mom would fit in there.
Tessa’s cool spot is anywhere there’s water. Sometimes, we believe Tessa is part raccoon for as much as she splashes around and plays in any kind of running water. And since we don’t know her beginnings in life, sure, let’s just run with that theory for the time being.
Up on the kitchen island, Viola’s cool spot is in her box (not to be confused with Tessa’s box of which this is most definitely not!) with her belly up to catch a breeze. Just look at those curly toes! And yes, that belly is very kissable and she’s perfectly okay with that.
Lastly, and because there always has to be one of those kinds, Olivia’s “cool” spot is wherever there’s a heating pad. It could be 103 degrees Fahrenheit inside and she’d feel cold. Angel Ruby was the same way and taught us to leave the heated bed plugged in year round. No worries about sharing this bed with anyone this summer. Good thinking there, Olivia!
In a perfect world, all the Colehaus cats would all be wet food eaters. Health-wise, wet food is much better for them than dry kibble, but wet food, even the cheap stuff is more expensive when talking about feeding five adult cats.
Plus, we have two cats who absolutely refuse to even sniff wet food. Oh, we’re tried all the tricks – warming the food to get it extra stinky, adding this and that sprinkled on top or mixed in, and trial and error purchases of this and that brand and flavor that people swear by. Nothing works for these two girls, Pia and Olivia.
Well, pretty Olivia gave us a bit of a fright a couple of weeks ago when she began obsessively pulling out her leg and belly fur and then, stopped eating for four days.
Humidity in our area had been steadily dropping from its usual 36 percent to 17 over a week’s time and we had the driest April in recorded history. Our house heating system continued to dry the air and Olivia’s history of pulling out bits of her short, shiny fur every winter is well documented. So we figured as soon as rain began to fall again, all would be good.
Well, she stopped pulling out her fur all right because she’s nearly bald on her back legs and belly. Can’t pull out what ain’t there. When she stopped eating, that’s when we called our great and wonderfully accommodating vet to get Olivia seen asap.
In the meantime, Mom was able to get Olivia to eat three fingerfuls of Gerber Turkey baby food and about twenty pieces of Quint’s special dietary kibble. It was enough to keep her going and off to the vet she went the next day.
The good news is her blood work shows absolutely nothing amiss. No kidney disease, our biggest fear having lost so many to this. Her dental exam showed nothing going on, other than usual dental tartar buildup for a nine year old cat. Other than anal glands that really, really, really needed to be expressed, nothing else is going on. There really isn’t any bad news.
So, after that last part was taken care of, she got a single appetite encouragement shot and came back home demanding not her usual Iams kibble, but Quint’s Fancy Feast wet food by trying to dig her way into his special SureFlap feeding bowl! This is a girl who HATED anything to do with wet food prior to this incident.
Our vet told us not to try to switch her over from dry food to wet; the point was to just get her to eat something, and we agreed. When she came home, she got her usual kibble, sprinkled with Fortiflora, and while she didn’t seem to mind the Fortiflora part (she licked it off each kibble piece and left the kibble), when we added ten pieces of Quint’s special kibble, she gobbled those up and begged for more.
Dad gave her a tablespoon of Quint’s wet food, next to her Fortiflora-ized kibble and she scarfed the wet food and licked the Fortiflora off the kibble again. He repeated this twice a day, every day for several days, with the same result. And every time, that licked-over Iams kibble left sitting in her bowl was put in a container out in the garage to give to the visiting raccoons who we’re pretty sure are wildly happy over that.
A week later, Dad gave Olivia an entire can of Quint’s Fancy Feast and ten pieces of Quint’s kibble and no Iams kibble at all. She ate everything and licked her bowl clean. Guess we have a very, very good girl who’s officially a wet food cat now. We are so proud of her!
We’re taking next Monday off to wrap up our work/home network repairs. Mom admits she will not be able to catch up on any sleep as she still needs to actually go to work at O’dark-thirty in the morning. It was a good thought, regardless. We’ll see you here again next Wednesday, June 2nd.
